CITSEE Research Project

CITSEE Stories

The common denominator – sometimes explicit, sometimes hidden or self-evident – of all the pioneers’ activities was patriotism and the basic values of socialist Yugoslavia, such as its history in the National Liberation War, the ideology of brotherhood and unity and the cult of Josip Broz Tito.

The legacy of the student protests in Croatia is multi-faceted. On a societal level, they were the first protests to bring into question the country’s contemporary economic and political order from a radical Left perspective, invoking Marxist vocabulary in the process. In the educational field, they were the first to exercise a critical reading of educational policies by locating them in the broader neoliberal context and critiquing them from a human rights and social justice standpoint. They were successful in terms of influencing tuition fee policy, innovative in terms of their organisational creativity, which included gathering in assemblies and exercising direct democracy principles, and using social network websites for mobilising. They provided a spontaneous site for citizenship education and they had a biographical impact on certain student protesters who became committed to activism.

During these events, there was no attempt to show that precarity does not know boundaries, it just appeared that the interests of one group were exclusively their own and do not share their logic with others. This problem points to something more traumatic in Bosnian society. This is not only a consequence of the war which ended in 1995, but which is still going on, that the political elites in the last twenty years are using ethno-nationalist manipulation and threats of new conflicts on grounds of ethnicity and in this way obscuring other problems that face the country.

The current wave of protests and plenums in Bosnia and Herzegovina may thus represent the birth of true activist citizenship, and the profound politisation of a society over the most fundamental questions for any country, namely social justice and equality for all its citizens. What happens in Bosnia, will not stay only in Bosnia.

I can’t pretend that the aesthetic dimension of a writer’s work isn’t the most important thing, nor that being a writer and an activist are the same kinds of role. But if we don’t want to influence people’s thoughts and beliefs, why do we bother to write? Isn’t there always a degree of didacticism? I don’t think it’s superfluous or redundant to pose that old question: what is literature for?

Citizenship legislation and the associated administrative practices highlight several key points. First, membership in a supranational entity such as the EU has far-reaching effects, erasing to some degree the distinction between citizens and non-citizens but also making Bulgaria a more attractive proposition for various “third-country nationals”. Second, the provision of citizenship via naturalisation has broadened rent-seeking opportunities and exposed institutional weakness, a painfully familiar story in post-communist Bulgaria. Third, and most important, citizenship continues to oscillate between civic and more ethnicised notions.

The Romanian policy of restitution of citizenship to former citizens has mixed justifications and complex implications. Invoking the moral obligation of the state to undo historical wrongs, post-communist leaders attempted to recreate the pre-war national community by restoring citizenship to people who were left outside the borders after the Second World War. This generated critical reactions from the neighbouring countries where former Romanian citizens live, particularly Ukraine and Moldova. Although officials insisted that the policy was not driven by ethno-nationalists ideals, recent amendments that restrict the entitlement to the restoration of citizenship to former citizens through birth suggest a nationalist conception of citizenship that is defined primarily in terms of organic ties established through birth.

In today’s Hungary the poor suffer from the attacks of the present political regime that has openly declared its intention to create a strong national middle class based on a firm work ethic principle. As the Prime Minister, Mr Orbán stated, “all countries have to undertake the correction of their welfare state. It is more difficult in the West because there they have well-established welfare regimes while it is less difficult in Central Europe because the welfare state has not been constructed here. (…) Our program is to create a society based on work instead of the uncompetitive Western type of welfare state.”